


Forever Turning Restless

by TheWaffleBat



Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: Confinement?, First Meetings, Gen, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-16
Updated: 2019-01-16
Packaged: 2019-10-09 14:27:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17408621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWaffleBat/pseuds/TheWaffleBat
Summary: Days and nights passed by unchangingly, or maybe there was no day and night anymore, everything blurred together into one long, awful nightmare. Most of the time there was no moon and stars or sun to tell the time with, and when there was the stars werewrong, not the stars he knew. Sometimes he wondered if the man with the stick had the power to change the sky, but he tried not to do that; everything, even his kind, had their limits, and could die. He wasn’t going to make the mistake of thinking something more powerful than it was just because it was clever enough to give itself magic.The Asset on how he came to Occam, and what he thought about humans.





	Forever Turning Restless

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Ernestine Northover's _Oh Sea._

Every place they moved him to was _dead_. Dead sky, dead water, _dead dead dead_ **_dead_**. There was no place it was not death, not even himself and for the first time he _feared_ it, because what was _he_ compared to these scaleless things with sticks that shocked and numbed and a poison just weak enough not to kill him flowing through his veins from the tiny, shiny needles like the needles of the plants lining his river?

He’d never had to fear death, not really. Not since he was very small, and very young, and he was long grown out of that. His people didn’t fear death, didn’t need to until they were old and losing scales. A wound was nothing but an irritation, easily dealt with, and forgotten in the way all things that were irritating were forgotten; like the frustration of an argument, quickly left abandoned because they were family, would always be family, and what was a dispute over a meal to that? A moment of pain in his life, but there were lots of things that were moments of pain, some worse than others, so it was easy to not care about it.

But these people made him afraid, made him hurt. Their sticks had a power he didn’t understand, one that the elders had never warned him about so maybe they didn’t know about it; stopped the healing power flickering through his skin and everything _hurt_ , constant and grating and making the dead water taste deader with the dull clouds of blood.

No, he decided; deafened by the grating drone rumbling through the water, his teeth hurting from the constant, unchanging sound vibrating in his bones. No, they weren’t people, not like the land-folk who lived out of the water but liked the ones like him who did, who brought them gifts of foreign food and beautiful flowers, and certainly not like his who lived in the water and occasionally used their gifts on those other people because sometimes hunting was very slim and their gifts helped more than any of them could say. _These_ were not people, and they were not animals; no animal liked to hurt as the one who held the stick did, didn’t take their joy from the pain of prey, or perhaps more aptly _cheating_ to make a predator his prey and taking enjoyment from that, like it was the chasing games played by hatchlings only worse because he bared his teeth - _happy_ \- when he realised he was hurting his playmate.

Days and nights passed by unchangingly, or maybe there was no day and night anymore, everything blurred together into one long, awful nightmare. Most of the time there was no moon and stars or sun to tell the time with, and when there was the stars were _wrong_ , not the stars he knew. Sometimes he wondered if the man with the stick had the power to change the sky, but he tried not to do that; everything, even his kind, had their limits, and could die. He wasn’t going to make the mistake of thinking something more powerful than it was just because it was clever enough to give itself magic.

He learned enough of their words to understand a little bit of what they were doing through the days. The tiny little pocket of dead water he was in was called a tank, and he was being taken somewhere that was not a tank but a facility. He didn’t know what a facility was, but given everything that had happened he assumed it would be another thing for the man with the stick to torment him with. The _things_ that pressed up against the tank - they were not people, even if they had faces a little like his - had names, he discovered, or at least sounds they used for each other like names like the clicks and rumbles his kind used for each other. The man with the stick had many; he was Strickland, and Sir, and Colonel Strickland, and Richard. One man called him Colonel, like a nickname between friends but with the two of them too cold to be friendly, pointed and almost insulting.

He learned the name they used for him, or at least the one that didn’t sound quite so nasty as the others; The Asset. He didn’t like it, but it was better than anything else they used for him so he let them use it. There was nothing he could do to _stop_ them using it, but it... helped, when he let himself believe he was making a choice. Made it just a little more bearable to be in the tank even though he _hated_ it, hurled himself against its ceiling with a howl because he wanted _out_ , wanted his river and his sea and the wide sweep of the forest lining its banks, the sun and moon and _his_ stars, and _his_ people and the people of the forest they were allied with.

Clawed at the bottom because he remembered, dimly because of the poison they flooded him with but _remembered_ the opening, the place they shoved him through to trap him here, but there was nothing but the hard container harsh against his claws, vibrations through his bones that set his teeth on edge and _hurt_ almost but not quite like pain; looked up and hurled himself back at the window because another _thing_ was looking at him and he _did not want_ another one looking at him.

Even though he’d tried to scare it away, like the other _things_ the _thing_ that looked different to the others came back, and he got a better look at it, noticed something familiar about it that he couldn’t quite place. It looked… softer than all the rest; kinder, when it approached the deeper dead-water tank he was sealed inside and put its hand to the front that looked out on what seemed to be just another bigger tank, but that the _things_ came and went from, so maybe this facility was a different kind of tank.

It didn’t look at him like he was evil, or lesser. It didn’t look at him like he was no more than a piece of fallen fruit, rotting at the base of its tree. Curious, maybe. A little awed and a little frightened like the people of the forest had been, and for a moment he looked close and tried to see if she was one of them, but her skin was different and she wore different coverings so he thought it was a good guess she wasn’t.

He was a little disappointed, but she was interesting enough to make up for it. Didn’t use any name for him, or spat insults he didn’t really understand at him. Didn’t flood his veins with poison or inexplicable power - didn’t have the stick it came from in her hand. Her hair was long, unlike the other _things_ , and her shapes were different. She seemed almost as nervous around her own kind of _things_ as he was, and he wondered if maybe they hurt her, too, but different, maybe, to the way they hurt him. Wondered if she was trapped in this labyrinth of bigger tanks the way he was in this smaller one.

He swam away before any of the other _things_ caught sight of him - there was nowhere in this tank they _couldn’t_ see him but the illusion of it was important, the distinction _mattered_ and in this dead place of dead sky and dead earth, dead water in his gills tasting like his blood and like his fear he needed it.

Vaguely - perhaps a little irrationally, she might still hurt him - he hoped she’d come back.

**Author's Note:**

> Horrendously late to the fandom, as usual, but I only just got the chance to watch the Shape of Water and god I love it. Not even just because it's beautiful, atmospheric, and well-written - literally just because Guillermo Del Toro has enough of an appreciation for actual, physical goddamn sets and real costuming for his monsters, and only used CGI when real prosthetics, like The Asset's eyes, wouldn't work. Unlike the fucking live-action Jungle Books that I fucking loathe with every fibre of my being.
> 
> I watched a making-of for the live-action Jungle Books and you know the only thing that's real in the entire film? The actor for Mowgli. That's it - everything else was CGi and if you have a budget of 175 million USD you shouldn't get away with that bullshit when Guillermo del Toro can make a movie four times as beautiful with just bits of latex and foam, clever lighting, and 20 million USD.


End file.
